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Post by dem bones on Sept 1, 2015 23:16:33 GMT
Is it time for a haunted legs thread? Probably not It is now. Meet the legless ones! Anon - The Witch Spectre: (1845: exhumed in Peter Haining [ed.], A Circle Of Witches, 1971). H. G. Bell - The Merchant Of Rotterdam (c. 1866: exhumed in Michel Parry [ed.], Reign Of Terror 2, 1977). Ambrose Bierce - The Middle Toe of the Right Foot ( San Francisco Examiner Aug. 17, 1890). John Metcalfe - The Smoking Leg ( The Smoking Leg, 1926: Michael Sissons [ed.], In The Dead Of Night, 1962). Frank Belknap Long -The Man with a Thousand Legs ( Weird Tales, Aug. 1927: Kurt Singer's Horror Omnibus, 1966). Edmond Hamilton - Dead Legs ( Strange Tales, Jan. 1932). 'Flavia Richardson' - Behind The Yellow Door [Christime Campbell Thomson [ed.], Terror By Night, 1934. Mark Channing - The Feet (Dennis Wheatlley [ed.], A Century Of Horror, 1935: Mary Danby [ed.], 16th Fontana Book Of Great Horror Stories, etc.). Justin Dowling - The Legs that Walked: ( Weird Tales, Nov 1953). "...with every clap of thunder they came marching on." Your very consciousness will be changed by "The Legs that Walked". Charles Braunstone - Suitable Applicant (Herbert Van Thal [ed.], 8th Pan Book Of Horror Stories, 1967) Martin Waddell - Old Feet (Herbert Van Thal [ed.], 9th Pan Book Of Horror Stories, 1968) Donald A. Wollheim - The Horror Out Of Lovecraft (Robert A W Londres [ed], Magazine Of Horror #27, May 1969) John Blackburn - Dad (Hugh Lamb [ed.] Return From The Grave, 1976). Richard Christian Matheson - Third Wind (Dennis Etchison [ed.], Masters Of Darkness, 1986). John Llewellyn Probert - The Markovski Quartet ( The Catacombs Of Fear, 2009). As ever, any and all suggestions welcome. Coming soon in this "exciting series" .... you really don't want to know.
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Post by mcannon on Sept 2, 2015 10:29:28 GMT
How about "The Revolt of the Pedestrians", by David H Keller MD (Amazing Stories February 1928)? "Society has divided itself into the atrophied, vaguely cybernetic “drivers” and tribes of death-defying “pedestrians.” :- Attachments:
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Post by dem bones on Sept 2, 2015 14:06:10 GMT
"Ah yes, it was meat, it was meat all right/ A joint those three will never forget/ For they stood alone in the Surrey night/ With the severed thigh of a plump brunette . . ." - William Plomer, The Dorking Thigh (1945) How about "The Revolt of the Pedestrians", by David H Keller MD (Amazing Stories February 1928)? "Society has divided itself into the atrophied, vaguely cybernetic “drivers” and tribes of death-defying “pedestrians.” :- Ah, I have a copy of that in Dr. Keller's Tales Of Underwood. Sounds similar in premise to Fritz Leiber's X Marks The Pedwalk ( Worlds Of Tomorrow, April 1963: 'Alfred Hitchcock's Stories That Scared Even Me, 1967)? Another contender: Al Sarrantonio - The Man With Legs (Karl E. Wagner [ed], Years Best Horror Stories XII, 1984) Either my head's not going or lethal legs/ toes of terror come off a very poor second to wandering hands in the horror theme sweepstakes (sorry, but I can't bring myself to write, say, or even think "tr*pe"). Any list that feels compelled to include R. Chetwynd-Hayes' beyond tragic Big Feet ( 1st Armada Monster Book, 1975: Frights & Fancies, 2002) for lack of alternatives is always going to struggle. Worse, I can't think of a single hideously appropriate paperback cover to add by way of illustration. There must be at least one?
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Post by bobby on Sept 7, 2015 2:34:19 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Sept 7, 2015 6:20:05 GMT
Much appreciated, Bobby. Here's the best I've been able to come up with so far. God help us. And another for the listings: H. Thompson Rich - The Purple Cincture (Christine Campbell Thomson [ed.], Not At Night, 1925).
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Post by dem bones on Sept 9, 2015 19:45:07 GMT
That's more like it! Her out of Sawney Beane's horror harum shows how it's done. No question that, in the battle of the lethal limbs, the haunted hands are in the ascendancy over legs & Co., result of which is I'm now morbidly obsessed with knees, thighs, feet, and toes of the phantom, severed, killing variety. The law of averages surely dictates that at least one cover painting depicts a ghoulish type feasting upon a meaty shin-bone or clubbing someone to death with same? Pity James Greenwood's anti-Penny Dreadful article Penny Packets Of Poison is bereft of illustrations, because: R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Ghost Who Limped ( The Night Ghouls, 1975) S. Carleton - The Lame Priest (1901: David Blair [ed.], Gothic Short Stories, 2002). Noel Bertram - The Half-Legs ( Supernatural Stories 49, Oct. 1961). Mr. "Bertram" was Noel Boston, 1911-1966, vicar, antiquarian and author of a privately printed collection of Jamesian stories, Yesterday Knocks (1954), which evidently so impressed his friend R. Lionel Fanthorpe that he persuaded Badger to buy them. Have never read the story in question, but according to G.R. Collia on her splendid The Haunted Library blog:
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Post by dem bones on Sept 11, 2015 8:26:36 GMT
Its official! Legs & Co are the new arms, etc. Sort of. Cover scan borrowed from Loren Coleman's CryptozoonewsAlso - how could I have overlooked them? Davis Grubb - One Foot In The Grave ( Weird Tales, May 1948: One Foot In The Grave, 1966). Charles Birkin - The Smell Of Evil ( The Smell Of Evil, 1965).
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Post by dem bones on Sept 30, 2015 6:18:59 GMT
"I've even encountered one disembodied foot - you'll remember it, the 'Howling Bunion' case, which drove three Archbishops to the asylum." - David Langford, The Thing In The Bedroom. Ben Hollander - Legs: ( Fear # 29, May 1991). Kate, a country girl new to the Big Apple, dreams of being a model like her idol, Christie Brinkley. Everybody agrees she's got great legs, but so far all she has to show for her efforts is a crummy job waiting tables and a roach-infested apartment. It's December 31st, 1987, and Kate sees out the old year at the World Nightclub for "another comeback attempt by the Ramones." Serena, a beautiful Indian girl, invites her downstairs for a drink and introduces her to fabulously wealthy husband Sasha, who rents two entire floors of an exclusive hotel and just happens to be a leg man. Who can blame Kate for accompanying her new friends home on the promise of opium and wild sex? Trouble is, Sasha is a devotee of Siva and belongs to the very exclusive Society of Nilakantha who could teach even the Piers Gaveston dead-pig molesters a thing or two about revolting initiation ceremonies. Stephen King - Misery: (Viking, 1987). That gut-wrenching moment when a demented Annie Wilkes approaches the bed with an axe ... The terrifying Octopus-Men torment their human captives in Frank Belknap Long's Lair Of The Space Monster, ( Strange Tales, Dec. 1932) Thanks to H. P. Saucecraft ( Lizzie) and Justin ( Lair Of The Space Monster) for scans.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 16, 2015 16:50:42 GMT
Anonymous - A Phantom Toe (W. Bob Holland [ed.] Twenty-Five Ghost Stories, Ogilvie, 1904). " I leave you to conceive my horror when, upon looking at this said line of light, I saw there a naked human toe — nothing more." Gerald Griffin - The Unburied Legs ( Holland-Tide; or, Munster Popular Tales, 1827) Robert Holdstock - Having His Leg Pulled ( Dark Voices 5, 1993).
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Post by dem bones on Sept 27, 2016 5:45:50 GMT
E. M. Stevenson Howard R Marsh - The Foot Fetish: ( Weird Tales, June 1926). A Tale of Mystery - Slant-eyed Zealots from the Gobi Hills and a Beautiful American Girl Who Bore a Sacred Birthmark.. Not seen a copy so unsure just how much hot foot action this one does or does not embrace. Sounds intriguing though, don't it? Anon - The Walking Leg: ( Out of the Night #1, American Comics Group, Feb. 1952). Vampoll the magician is cut down by tommy-gun blast as he made his way from the Lyceum with the weekly takings from his act. Surgeons save his life but at the expense of a leg which is amputated below the knee. The magician insists the limb be shod and buried in a regular coffin, or else how can it avenge him? The thieves soon have cause to wish they'd never been born!
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Post by ropardoe on Sept 27, 2016 11:35:13 GMT
Good grief! Talk about a weird topic. But it does give me the opportunity to recommend the best phantom limb story ever written: Christine Brooke Rose's "The Foot". It's narrated by the phantom leg itself, and is strangely wonderful - almost a love story (strangely realistic too).
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Post by dem bones on Sept 28, 2016 10:23:23 GMT
Good grief! Talk about a weird topic. But it does give me the opportunity to recommend the best phantom limb story ever written: Christine Brooke Rose's "The Foot". It's narrated by the phantom leg itself, and is strangely wonderful - almost a love story (strangely realistic too). Thank you, Ro. Have been after a copy of James Turner's The Unlikely Ghosts (Mayflower, 1969) for many moons (love that cover photo), but to date it has eluded me. Your endorsement of The Foot suggests I should step up the search.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 10, 2016 7:06:13 GMT
Harker got a new leg: but soon he wished he were rid of it because it began to lead him a weird chase. Russell Milburn P. F. Costello [William P. McGivern] - The Tireless Leg: ( Fantastic Adventures, Nov. 1942). "Do you feel anything in your recently acquired member?"A squalid Chicago boarding house. Silas Harker, 35, is behind with the rent and Mrs McDougall is threatening to evict him. Harker would be rich had his late father not disowned and disinherited him for theft, drinking, gambling, nebulous "ungentlemanly habits," and being a total callous bastard. Instead he's about to be drafted and, once probate is settled, all the lovely loot will go to Mr & Mrs Mason, the senile old fools who kept house for Harker senior - unless Silas is declared disabled and unable to earn a living. Dr. Henrich Zinder, a MAD SURGEON, late of the German Imperial Army Medical Corps, has the simple solution to Harker's problem if he will only agree to having his leg amputated! Zinder reassures Harker that he will only be minus the limb for enough time as it takes to prove his incapacity to the solicitor, because ".... The stupid morons of the medical world refuse even to listen to what I have accomplished. And I have accomplished miracles .... I have perfected a technique of grafting human limbs onto live bodies!" Harker's first thought is to slug Zinder for even suggesting such a hair-brained scheme, but the more he thinks things through .... It's a crazy stunt to pull, but it might just work! Some months later, Harker has inherited a fortune, the Doc has fitted him a new leg, everything in the garden is rosy! Zinder is pretty cut up that he had to kill a guy to acquire the substitute limb, but at least there'll be no recovering the rest of the donor's body from where he disposed of it! True to type, Harker murders Zinder now that the creepy old coot has served his purpose. Which is when the leg takes on a life of its own ....
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Post by ropardoe on Oct 10, 2016 8:09:46 GMT
I've just remembered that there was an episode of Criminal Minds, in which the ever-wonderful Ray Wise played a husband with an amputee wife who, in an effort to 'cure' her, was experimenting on other women by removing their legs and transplanting them onto different women. Oddly enough they had a tendency to die! Lots of fun for all (nearly as good as the episode in which the equally wonderful Brad Dourif played a man who was making living string puppets out of people), and actually quite a good political message at the end.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 10, 2016 9:10:11 GMT
I've just remembered that there was an episode of Criminal Minds, in which the ever-wonderful Ray Wise played a husband with an amputee wife who, in an effort to 'cure' her, was experimenting on other women by removing their legs and transplanting them onto different women. Oddly enough they had a tendency to die! Lots of fun for all (nearly as good as the episode in which the equally wonderful Brad Dourif played a man who was making living string puppets out of people), and actually quite a good political message at the end. .... which in turn reminds me of the Ken Spartan, supreme Olympic athlete episode in Peter Saxon's supreme Scream And Scream Again/ The Disorientated Man. Dear God, this ridiculous thread may even run to two pages. In case it doesn't come across in recent post, P. F. Costello's The Tireless Leg is a gem, almost The Hands Of Orlac meets Young Frankenstein.
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